In the heat of political debate, the conservative is often met with a dismissive, three-word challenge: "Conserve what?" The implication is that conservatism is nothing more than a nostalgic clinging to the past, a fear of progress, or a defense of old prejudices. It is a powerful critique, because so often, conservatives themselves fail to answer it with anything deeper than a policy preference. But the true answer to this question is not about tax rates or regulations. It is about the very nature of reality. The true conservative is not trying to preserve a specific decade of history. We are trying to conserve the single most revolutionary discovery in the history of the human race. We are trying to conserve the Idea of the Human Person.

To understand what is at stake, we must look at the world before this discovery. In the ancient pagan world, the human being had no inherent, transcendent value. A man was a citizen, a subject, a slave, or a soldier. His worth was determined by his utility to the tribe or the state. The idea that a weak, poor, or useless person had an "inalienable right" to life or liberty would have been considered a form of madness.

Then, into this world of power and hierarchy, the Christian faith introduced a blinding new light: the Imago Dei. It was the radical claim that every single human person, from the emperor to the leper, is created in the image and likeness of the Living God. This was not just a theological doctrine. It was a metaphysical earthquake that shattered the foundations of the ancient world and laid the groundwork for everything we now call "freedom."

Consider Human Rights. Where did this concept come from? It did not come from nature, which is red in tooth and claw. It came from the realization that if a human being is a sacred icon of God, then he possesses a dignity that no other human being can violate. The state does not grant rights; it can only recognize the rights that God has already given. This is the only logic that can stand against the tyrant. If our rights are not from God, they are from the state, and what the state gives, the state can take away.

Consider Liberty. The ancients understood freedom as the power of the strong to rule. Christianity redefined freedom as the capacity of the soul to choose the Good. Because the human person is made for God, his conscience is a sanctuary where no earthly power can tread. This is the origin of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. It is the belief that there is a part of man that Caesar cannot touch.

Consider Limited Government. In the pagan world, the State was divine. The Emperor was a god. Christianity desacralized the state. It declared that "Caesar is not God." It insisted that the state is a servant, not a master, and that it stands under the judgment of a higher, transcendent law. This is the birth of constitutionalism -- the idea that power must be limited by law because no man is good enough to have absolute power over another.

This is what we are trying to conserve. We are trying to conserve the Source Code of the West.

The modern "liberal" project, for all its talk of freedom, has drifted from this source. In the name of a new and untethered freedom, it has severed the human person from this sacred root. It has re-defined the human being not as a child of God, but as a material accident, a bundle of desires, a "human animal." It has kept the language of rights but destroyed the foundation that makes them real.

And we have seen, in the blood-soaked history of the 20th century, what happens when societies try to build a world on this new definition. When you remove the Imago Dei, you do not get a secular utopia. You get the Gulag. You get the gas chamber. You get a world where the strong devour the weak because there is no longer any sacred reason why they shouldn't.

So, when the critic asks, "Conserve what?", the answer is simple and terrifying. We are trying to conserve you. We are trying to conserve the only idea that guarantees your dignity, your rights, and your freedom against the encroaching dark. We are not fighting for the past. We are fighting for the only future that is truly human.